If this isnt the right forum to this please direct me to the right one:I recently purchased a prototype shield and there was the shield and this little white board with pins and sticker underneath.the prototype shield has many pins how do I know which is which?and what is the white little board for and how do I use it?

DO you have a picture / URL of what you bought?- The pins are identical to the Arduino normally, the white thing is probably a small breadboard in which you can put components to build a sketch without soldering. The sticker can be used to "glue" it to the protoshield.

It's pretty much a very small perforation board with some 5V and GND and arduino pins brought out. You can do very small projects on them. You solder components on the holes or use the white breadboard to avoid soldering. If you are a newbie or need some decent space to spread out your circuit components, try a decent size solder-less breadboard, that is at least 1,200 tie points in size.

Sparkfun has this one small one:http://www.sparkfun.com/products/112

or this "standard" size one from dipmicro:http://dipmicro.com/store/ZY-208

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160501996064&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_739wt_905if its a knock-off does it mean it wont work? because I did manage to hook stuff up to the main pins

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160501996064&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_739wt_905if its a knock-off does it mean it wont work? because I did manage to hook stuff up to the main pins

I didn't say it won't work. It's just that the seller doesn't care to put up enough information about how to use this hardware like the original designer or someone distributing it would do. If I am not mistaken, Lady Ada(adafruit.com) designed her original arduino protoshield, which is sold at several places. The design is in public domain so anyone can make them and sell. You get what you pay for, maybe not so much different on hardware, but pretty obvious on support and documentation, examples etc.

Anyway, if the sparkfun shield is the same (compare pictures), just use the sparkfun documentation. You'll be just fine Here is adafruit protoshield tutorial:

http://www.ladyada.net/make/pshield/

Open-source hardware is a dream world for copy cats and knock-offs. They make money while someone else is making the design and supporting users, or even taking blames ]

Update:

The ebay seller simply copied the texts from sparkfun website word for word:

They sit there and wait for you to build something. They don't do anything, they're not hooked up to anything, they're space for you to mount and wire up components. That's what makes it a prototype board.